In pursuit of the authentic life, well lived; this is why Microsoft propeller-head, Andy Pennell, is motivated to write in his Microsoft-sponsored blog, "Installing Vista: My Personal Hell".

Good stuff...

"I was seriously considering a trip to the garage and to smash the box
open with a hammer, when I discovered another transparent sticker that
was holding two parts together. With that gone, the box moved a few
more millimeters, until I realised [sic] the thing opens sideways..."

Okay, Andy's is the not-common individual install (and we know most people do not install their OS, or trash their BIOS and invoke the warranty for a new motherboard while they're at it). But it is not a particularly good time to say you're a Microsoft employee at the Rave.

So as a customer or CIO you're waiting for SP1. Well you know my advice (SP6 in 2010 might get into the ballpark). Vista is so complicated that it will never match Mac or Linux. This is why Microsoft will move to a BSD with proprietary layover.

Who's the greater bonehead, Microsoft management or the innocent customer for buying these half-ideas -- such detritus? I'm not so forgiving, myself, of the customer.

I was going to suggest the Board fire Ballmer, but he's our best chance of taking the company down to a stalk. Go Steve!

The world is about to announce its "Plan B". Now that ISO is moving ahead to fast-track MOOXML, the world is voting with its feet. I'm hearing accounts in the UK, Europe are joining the list of US Federal government agencies who will not be procuring Vista/Office2007 anytime soon.

John Gøtze kindly brings to our attention a new development in the Danish government's progress toward open software standards.

Now, having gotten past the preliminaries of whats, wherefores, hows & whys, the Danes have progressed to the question of implementations. This always reflects a watershed moment for government leaders, staffs & citizens who will be effected. It reflects a body of people coming through a process of understanding and it shows their confidence.

This reminds me of nothing more than Peter Quinn's meeting of vendors in the Massachusetts State House in June of 2005 where he said,

"Open document formats: I get it! But how do I get there? Discuss."

The difference now is that we are dealing with a whole country, Denmark, which according to scale is something like the size of Massachetts within the larger body, the European Union. In contrast to the Massachusetts situation, other parts of the EU are already migrating ahead of whatever policies or regulatory guidelines are being established. These include agencies in France, the UK, Germany and Belgium among others.

There is an interesting similarity to Massachusetts. The policy memorandum, ETRM 3.5, which fostered the ODF debate there was similar to this Danish plan in its underlying motivations and intent.

When a government gets past identifying the ideal scenarios that are possible, those which exist and are ready to implement -- in this case they include open standards like XHTML, CSS, ODF -- and moves on to the questions of how to get them used, there is always a large number of impediments to the final result. These include recalcitrant software monopolies (who are constantly trying to undo good policy work), general inertia against change, decentralized structure of multiple agencies with different ICT systems, leadership and beliefs about what works, and the difficulty in establishing an authoritative, credible but also flexible recipe for pushing change without increasing cost, stress & disruption.

That's why these policy frameworks look so alike: every bureaucracy gets to this same difficult place eventually -- 'How do we get there?'.

Says John Gøtze...

The implementation plan is presented in a report which suggests that
“open standards should be implemented gradually by making it mandatory
for the public sector to use a number of open standards when this
becomes technically feasible”.

What has happened?

The existing Danish Interoperability Framework (in Danish) has become mandatory. Separately, the report lists a number of open standards which should be implemented by Jan 1, 2008, through the normal course of system upgrading (unless the transition is deemed disruptive). Gøtze mentions a few...

Standards for data interchange between public authorities

Standards for electronic file and document handling

Standards for exchanging documents between public authorities (Open Document Format and Office OpenXML)

We're interested here in ODF. Here's what the report says about document formats...

With regard to standards for exchanging documents between public
authorities, the report proposes that “it should be mandatory to use at
least one of the document standards Open Document Format or Office
OpenXML”, and that it is up to the individual agency to decide what
they want. The report explains that a study will be conducted this year
with “the purpose of obtaining the necessary experience with these
standards before 1 January 2008″.

So, the Danes are looking at a mandatory shift to either or both of the two XML-based document formats. You say ODF AND MSOOXML BOTH! EEEEEEK!

This gives me no anxiety whatsoever. MSOOXML has already been thoroughly de-bunked vis a vis its repudiation of other existing standards; it is in perhaps a perpetual deep-freeze at ISO (from which Microsoft will not seek or wish to remove it, since "ISO status pending" is all they need to sell it; the alternative is to re-wire their entire new catalog of software); under further use testing and scrutiny in Denmark, its repudiation of the basic intentions of XML will be highlighted; and under scrutiny in Denmark the thorough dependency of MSOOXML documents upon the Microsoft stack (Vista, Exchange, Sharepoint, Outlook, MS SQL Server, IE7, Office 2007, Groove, etc.) and their lack of interoperability & compatibility outside the new Microsoft stack will be underscored and well understood. The Danes will find that MSOOXML is no solution.

Regarding document interoperability the Danes will learn on their own about the three possible solutions, two of which are free and one still requiring funding...

1) the Microsoft-Clever Age-Novell "MCAN" Translator (at sourceforge and being integrated into only Novell's version of OpenOffice.org)

2) the Sun Microsystems Plugin (still in development and promising document exchange fidelity equivalent to OpenOffice.org, which Massachusetts originally deemed inadequate for its decentralized migration)

Forbes Mag (and its .com) can typically be counted on as a Microsoft cheer-leader; at the worst of times its people -- like Daniel Lyons -- provide unimaginative regurgitation of Microsoft press releases, repetition of its anti-competitive FUD or verbatim repetition of its message du jour. This reflects Steve Forbes' social ties with Bill Gates as much as a foundational cultural compulsion to pander to the Ayn Rand block with a smug sense of entitlement that never quite shakes the flavor of its owner's preppy, chauffeur-driven, pinched face.

Once in a while the magazine editors let a journalist out of the cage. Today that would be Stephen Manes whose "Dim Vista" tells the dark truth about Microsoft's new operating system. The Manes article is all the more shocking for its candor and its uniqueness within the obsequious Microsoft feeding-chain...

Vista is a fading theme park with a few new rides, lots of patched-up
old ones and bored kids in desperate need of adult supervision [my link: "Cancel or Allow"] running
things. If I can find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why
can't Microsoft?The new desktop search features are a mess...

Still with us: program crashes, followed by the machine's refusal to
shut down until you lean on the power button awhile. Thereafter you may
be subjected to ugly white-on-black text from CHKDSK, a DOS-era program
that issues baffling new reports like "44 reparse records processed."

My recommendation: Don't even consider updating an old machine to
Vista, period. And unless you absolutely must, don't buy a new one with
Vista until the inevitable Service Pack 1 (a.k.a. Festival o' Fixes)
arrives to combat horrors as yet unknown.

Being at Forbes, Manes still feels compelled to nod to Microsoft's legendary Chairman who is obviously past caring...

As Bill Gates winds down his roles at Microsoft, Windows Vista may
be the chief software architect's swan song. It's a shame his legacy is
something so utterly unimaginative, internally discordant and woefully
out of tune.

BBC Click's Chris Long wonders -- "Tech rant: Vista visions" -- what's all the attention on Vista for and why do we need to talk to Bill Gates who stopped writing code in 1986 and isn't the boss, anyway.

Voice command is autoloaded if you calibrate the system and enable Voice commands. You can actually activate voice command mode by saying a certain phrase. If this exploit works, you could say that phrase first and then start your commands. Then you'd say "start", "cmd", "enter", then bark out the commands you want. This assumes it works and that no one near the PC gets suspicious.

I can see it now; all you need is one 0wned host every few feet and you can bark commands to all the others within earshot. First thing you tell them is to join in the sing-along. It would make a great movie scene -- with maybe Richard Clarke looking over his shoulder down a corridor in the Pentagon and saying "Do you hear that?" as a crescendo of "halt-and-catch-fire" rises in the in the distance...

Here's $500 for the first documented case of someone using the white courtesy phone in an airport to page Mr Shootdown, Reese Sett, Sleep Now, or whatever and blanking all the laptops in a concourse. An extra $500 if it's DC National...

Undoubtedly this would make a great scene in parody of a Robert Ludlum movie with Matt Damon and Denzel Washington running through an airport to catch a Lex-Luther type bad guy who looks a lot like Casino Royale's le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen).

If there is one notion that explains the ho-hum atmosphere, the exhaustion that's set in after the Vista launch and the slow sales off of CompUSA shelves it is this...

We live in the browser now.

This is why a new OS -- even a fancy one -- produces no shizzle anymore. It's a dialtone.

Microsoft, which is to say Jim Allchin, were looking at customer focus group info and processing really pissed off customer requests that were five years old: that's why they've missed it. The Gorrilla gets old.

(As I write, my Firefox download counter is heading for 300 million in a day or two.)